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By Sudarshan Varadhan, A. Ananthalakshmi and Ahmed Farhatha<\/strong>
SRIPERUMBUDUR: For women who assembled iPhones at a Foxconn<\/a> plant in southern India, crowded dorms without flush toilets and food sometimes crawling with worms were problems to be endured for the paycheck.
But when tainted food sickened over 250 of the workers their anger boiled over, culminating in a rare protest that shut down a plant where 17,000 had been working.
A close look by Reuters at the events before and after the Dec. 17 protest casts a stark light on living and working conditions at Foxconn, a firm central to Apple<\/a>'s supply chain.
The tumult comes at a time when Apple is ramping up production of its iPhone 13 and shareholders are pushing the company to provide greater transparency about labour conditions at suppliers.
Reuters spoke to six women who worked at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. All of them requested they not to be named because of fear of retaliation on the job or from police.
Workers slept on the floor in rooms, which housed between six to 30 women, five of these workers said. Two workers said the hostel they lived in had toilets without running water.
\"People living in the hostels always had some illness or the other -- skin allergies, chest pain, food poisoning,\" another worker, a 21-year-old woman who quit the plant after the protest, told Reuters. Earlier food poisoning cases had involved one or two workers, she said.
\"We didn't make a big deal out of it because we thought it will be fixed. But now, it affected a lot of people,\" she said.
FOXCONN PLANT ON PROBATION<\/strong>
Apple and Foxconn said on Wednesday they found that some dormitories and dining rooms used for employees at the factory did not meet required standards.
The facility has been placed \"on probation\" and Apple will ensure its strict standards are met before the plant reopens, Apple said in a statement.
\"We found that some of the remote dormitory accommodations and dining rooms being used for employees do not meet our requirements and we are working with the supplier to ensure a comprehensive set of corrective actions are rapidly implemented.\"
Apple did not elaborate on the improvements that would be made for workers at the plant or the standards that would be applied.
Laws governing housing for women workers in Tamil Nadu mandate each person be allocated at least 120 square feet of living space and require housing to adhere to hygiene and fire safety standards as laid out by local authorities.
Foxconn said it was restructuring its local management team and taking immediate steps to improve facilities. All employees would continue to be paid while it makes necessary improvements to restart operations, the company said.
Venpa Staffing Services, a Foxconn contractor that runs the dorm where workers were sickened by food poisoning, declined to comment.
The food poisoning and subsequent protests have also led to investigations, some of which are ongoing, by at least four Tamil Nadu state agencies. Officials have also privately told Foxconn to ensure better conditions, senior state government officials said.
\"It is Foxconn's responsibility,\" Thangam Thennarasu, the industries minister of Tamil Nadu state told Reuters.
The Tamil Nadu state government said in a statement last week that the state had asked Foxconn to ensure that working and living conditions were improved, including the quality of housing and drinking water.
Foxconn has agreed to ensure that worker living conditions follow government recommendations and meet legal requirements, the statement said.
Apple and Foxconn did not indicate in their statements when the plant would reopen.
Foxconn had told state officials that it had \"ramped up production too quickly,\" though production was curtailed during April and May when the Delta variant of COVID-19 was raging in India, a senior government official from the state's industries department told Reuters.
Taiwan-based Foxconn opened the plant in 2019 with the promise of creating up to 25,000 jobs, a boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's \"Make in India\" campaign to create manufacturing jobs.
Sriperumbudur, a town outside Chennai where the factory is situated, is a busy industrial area with factories that make Samsung and Daimler products nearby.
The factory is central to Apple's efforts to shift production away from China due to tensions between Beijing and Washington. Reuters reported last year that Foxconn planned to invest up to $1 billion in the plant over three years.
Foxconn contracts out the staffing of the factory to labour brokers, who are also responsible for housing the workers - mostly women - employed there.